Mark,
I was following this but didn't comment based on my lack of techno babble. I will, however, accept any dollars you would like to send for my support. :-)
Having said that, you mentioned a 5 year old system. May be worthwhile to run chkdsk, or better yet, just replace the hard drive(s) with something new. And get an OEM copy of Windows 7 while you are at it.
As a side note, when I had my new build done in October, I had it set up with a 256GB SSD for the operating system and programs and have all the other stuff go to 2 other 1 TB HDDs. The system absolutely screams.
